Abstract
MR. GILL's little manual is intended either for private study or for class-teaching, and has special reference to the requirements of those who have to learn the small modicum of chemistry required for the matriculation examination of the University of London. He has indicated the chapters necessary for the latter by a †, an act which we cannot at all approve. Surely, if even so light an examination as the one in question has to be undertaken in what may be to some a distasteful study, it is better to know too much than too little, and Mr. Gill's little book is not such a very dreadful treatise that one need be afraid of reading it through. If the examinations are to mean nothing more than the “getting up” of a set of special chapters written for the purpose, they had better by far be abandoned at once. With this exception we have little fault to find. Great care has been taken in arranging and systematising the work, though this has been pushed rather far—the word “acid,” for instance, being almost banished. The great merit of the book is, however, to be found in the very admirably-selected questions placed at the end of each chapter: we feel sure that anyone conscientiously endeavouring to understand and work these out would learn more, and that more thoroughly, than he would by a vast amount of desultory reading and rambling through of larger works. We would say to any candidate for the London matriculation, “Let him neglect Mr. Gill's advice about the marked chapters, and work conscientiously through the book.”
Chemistry for Schools.
By C. Haughton Gill. With 100 illustrations. Second edition. (London: Edward Stanford, 6 and 7, Charing Cross, 1873.)
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[Book Reviews]. Nature 8, 160 (1873). https://doi.org/10.1038/008160b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/008160b0